Queer and the City

Figuration was proud to host one of the many Pride in London events for 2017, celebrating Queerness at the Royal Institute of British Architects. A large group of Pride goers, architects and Figuration regulars descended on RIBA’s Art Deco headquarters for the only creative workshop in the 2017 Pride in London calendar.

After a welcome from hosts Leo and Roy, models Lidia and Pinto Nan posed against images of cities as Queer history was being made, all taken from RIBA's British Architectural Library, the world’s greatest architectural archive.

ATHENS 5TH CENTURY BCE

Classical Greece is well known to have normalised behaviours and identities that would today be considered queer. In the late 5th C BCE, a passionate debate on love is said to have taken place in Athens, including Aristophanes’s origin story of same-sex attraction. The debate was later recorded by Plato in The Symposium. This emblematic event would have taken place in the shadow of the recently rebuilt Parthenon (designed by Iktinos and Kallicrates) and captured here in a photoprint of 1880 now held in the RIBA Collections.

KHAJURAHO 950-1050

The Khajuraho temple complex in Madhya Pradesh, India, has an extraordinary density of sculptural adornment. Amongst these are depictions of diverse erotic activity, including polyamorous groupings and same-sex pairings. These depictions have been interpreted as tantric sexual practice and a culture of Kama or desire (including sexual desire) as an essential and proper part of human life. Part of the complex was captured in this photoprint of 1882 by Deen Dayal (RIBA Collections).

BERLIN, 1919-1933

Between the wars, Berlin saw an explosion of artistic and intellectual practice. Alongside this, a new freedom of expression fuelled an alternative and queer nightlife, famously captured by Christopher Isherwood in Goodbye to Berlin (1939), later adapted into the musical and film Cabaret. In this image, we see a typical Modernist building of this period: Berlin’s Kosmos Filmbuhne at night, designed by Frederick Lucas Marcus in 1930 (RIBA Collections)

LONDON 1967

The 1967 Sexual Offences Act was the first step on the path to decriminalise homosexual acts in the UK. Around the same time, George Marsh’s Centrepoint was completed (R. Seifart & Partners), with its 33-storey tower looming over Soho. This image from the Architectural Press Archive at RIBA shows the new building across the rooftops of Covent Garden with the Post Office Tower behind (Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections).

NEW YORK 1970s

In June 1969, the Stonewall Riots in New York sparked a global movement of queer activism. Within a few years, activist organisations and publications had been established in the city, spreading across the US and internationally. All this was against the backdrop of the rising Twin Towers of the World Trade Center (designed by Minoru Yamasaki), once the tallest buildings in the world. The Towers (completed 1970 and 1972) are captured here by Daniel George Kantorowich in a photo from 1981 (RIBA Collections).

AMSTERDAM 2001

In 2000, The Dutch Parliament passed a bill to legalise same-sex marriages, which came into effect on 1 April the following year. Job Cohen, Mayor of Amsterdam, officiated at four ceremonies that day. Couples may well have celebrated with a stroll down one of the city’s distinctive canals, passing buildings like the Dolphijn House, one of the many grand houses that make up Amsterdam’s picture-postcard image. This 17th-century print by Hendrick de Keyser shows the house’s original elevation (RIBA collections).

REYKJAVIK 2009

In 2009, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir became Iceland’s first female Prime Minister and the world's first openly gay head of government. Not only did she steer the country through the aftermath of its financial crisis, she also cemented its place as a model for gender equality. In this photo taken by Paul Ashton in 2012 towards the end of her office, we see Reykjavik’s distinctive Hallgrimskirkja, commissioned from architect Guðjón Samúelsson in 1937 (RIBA Collections).

TAICHUNG 2017

In May this year, Taiwan’s constitutional court ruled that current laws defining unions as between a man and a woman are invalid. This sets the country on track to be the first in Asia to allow same-sex couples to marry. One of the country’s newest architectural landmarks is Toyo Ito's Taichung Metropolitan Opera House (completed 2016). This architectural drawing shows the vast interior spaces and the surrounding public landscape.

Lidia’s two-minute poses where dramatically framed by New York’s World Trade Centre, whose Twin Towers rose as civil rights marches gave birth to the Pride parades we know today. Pinto’s two-minute poses were in the shadow of the Parthenon, at a time when Socrates and the leading lights of male Athenian society were discussing the nature of Love.

Lidia and Pinto joined each other on stage after the quick-draw warm-ups, at one point in Weimar Berlin (thank you Christopher Isherwood) and another in present-day Taiwan, the first East Asian country to legalise same-sex marriage. They journeyed the globe, from Reykjavík in 2009, when Iceland elected the first gay head of government, to the Khajuraho temple complex in Madhya Predesh, India, where sculptural adornment includes joyous depictions of polyamorous and same-sex sex groupings.